Faced with the prospect of no job and with her career at a crossroads, Georgia Ebsary decided to return to a teenage passion – cars.

A self-confessed former tomboy from Tocumwal on the Murray River in southern New South Wales, Ebsary has created a ­limousine service with a difference, Miss Limousines.

Ebsary, who in 2009 launched the only Australian bespoke hire car service to employ female drivers in Sydney, admits it is an unorthodox career choice for a woman, and being a pioneer means a battle to achieve the vision.

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She sold her old Corolla car to pay for the new website and leased the first of her three cars – a Statesman Caprice. Plates, licensed by the government, cost just under $10,000 a year, per car.

She now has two other cars, leasing them when not in use to male drivers for other businesses at about $700 per week.

Word of mouth

Ebsary says she made about $50,000 in her first full calendar year, 2010. She has a core of about 12 older female clients. A whole day charge could be up to $1000.

The customer demographic, says Ebsary, is 40-plus and word of mouth has driven the business.

One advocate was a university professor whom she drove around Sydney, in virtual silence, for five days in 2010, earning about $5000. “That was the dream job," says Ebsary, who says tightening of budgets in the past 18 months has made things tougher.

Ebsary, in her 40s, studied social ­welfare at La Trobe University and in the mid-1990s qualified as a remedial masseuse at Sydney’s Australian College of Natural Therapies, before taking a job with a chiropractic clinic where she worked for 12 years until the owner of the practice retired.

Aside from her chiropractic work, Ebsary was a Benson & Hedges promotions girl, a grid girl at Bathurst and the Gold Coast Indy and occasionally modelled swimwear.

Good friend Tony Scopelliti, a Sydney wholesale car dealer at Lifestyle Motors, took her “under his wing" to do an apprenticeship in buying and selling cars, at the same time as she launched Miss Limousines. She is due to get her dealer’s licence in December 2013.

Ebsary is also a body-builder and at six feet tall in heels, she is a secure presence for her older clients.

She admits being dispirited by the male-dominated hire-car industry. But she is determined to achieve the original goal of an all-female limousine business.

She also believes she can provide opportunities for other women: “The hours are tough, but it might suit unskilled or single women, who can manage their hours around their clients."

The steely gaze indicates she will not give up easily on her vision – “my heart will break" – but if it all goes pear-shaped she has a fallback option: “There’s always the army. If they’ll have me."